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Design with Time in Mind - EuroIA 2013

Find the full write-up at: http://notura.com/2013/12/designing-with-time-in-mind/

From Stonehenge’s summer solstice to medieval genealogical charts and from grandfather to atomic clocks, Europe has a long history of building tools to keep track of and organise time. With the rise of social networks and the always-online capability of mobile phones, tracking and organising time plays a bigger role than ever. Facebook and Twitter pull us more and more away from the past and the future into a continuous present. Should we stay in the eternal now or do we need new tools for a longer time perspective?

How to successfully design for organising time is the question I will answer in my presentation. I will do this first by understanding the different ways people perceive time, second by analysing the different design solutions available for organising time, and finally by discussing a series of case studies that all have their own unique approaches to addressing past, present and future.

People experience time in different ways, some live surrounded by memories of the past, others are obsessed by accomplishing goals in the future. I will address some interesting findings from the field of time psychology, specifically, the time perspective inventory developed by psychologist Philip Zimbardo. His way of organising our attitudes to time around six variables is a great framework for a time-centred design project.

Over the last three millennia many useful ways of measuring and representing time have been developed. I will present a framework for understanding these different tools as design patterns. I will then demonstrate their practical uses for designing with time.

To show how an understanding of time perspective and design patterns can be used to structure and design a project, I will discuss several cases such as Lanyrd, Facebook,Timehop and Any.do to demonstrate how different approaches to working with time lead to very different outcomes.

Design with Time in Mind - EuroIA 2013

1.
Design with time in
mind
Sjors Timmer, EuroIA 2013

2.
If you look at
Twitter on iOS7 Facebook on iOS7
If you look at the recent rise of mobile companies, like Twitter, Facebook

3.
Or
Instagram on iOS7 Snapchat on iOS7
Instagram and especially SnapChat than it cannot have escaped you that they all
have a similar approach to time. They show you the last hour, minutes or even
seconds and they are brilliant at it. When you look around you at conferences, in
restaurants in busses and in bed, everywhere you ﬁnd people forever refreshing their
feed, forever sucked into the eternal now

4.
We’re great at building tools for the now,
but what about tools for working with
the future?

8.
Degree of
uncertainty
e higher the degree of
uncertainty
Present
Time
Future
The problem is that the further we try to think ahead the more uncertain events
become

9.
Cone of uncertainty
Present Time
Degree of
uncertainty
Future
This is what futurists call the cone of uncertainty, meaning that the further ahead we
look the more scenarios become possible. This of-course can be good or bad
depending on if you want change or continuity

10.
We build “designer environments” in which
human reason is able to far outstrip the
computational ambit of the unaugmented
biological brain.
- Andy Clark
in Being ere
What we need to think with time and uncertainty is a system to think in. It’s an
example of what Andy Clark, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh
calls designer environments, an arrangement of the outside world that allows us to
be a lot smarter than we could if we would rely on our brain alone

11.
Historic design challenges
— Priests
— Emperors
— Popes
— Kings
— Scientists
This history of making designer environments for time started long ago. For centuries
people have devoted their time to struggle with design challenges at hand

12.
Stonehenge
How might we make sense of the sun, the moon, the seasons and the years? What
can inform us about the right time for sowing and harvesting? For the early humans
time was very much connected with the earth and the heavens. Priests built the ﬁrst
mapping of the months, seasons and years based on the moon, sun and stars. The
amazing alignment of stonehenge to the mid summer and mid winter sun shows the
outstanding job they did.

13.
Fasti Antiates Maiores
Fasti Antiates Maiores (ca. 60 BC), a Roman calendar from before the Julian reform,
with the seventh and eighth months still named Quintilis ("QVI") and Sextilis ("SEX"),
and with a intercalary month, this month meant to ﬁx the year became a mess
because it was up to the emperor to decide when it came. Julius Caesar set out to ﬁx
the mess and was rewarded with the renaming of Quintilis is his honour

14.
Julian Calendar
In the 1500 years many small improvements were made by monk/scholars. But with
the Zodiac and illustrations you can still see how time was very much a living thing
between the people, the earth and the heavens above

15.
Pope
Gregory XIII
In an attempt to celebrate Easter on the date agreed upon in 325. Pope Gregory XIII
was the last of the great time reformers. In his name scientist managed to ﬁx the
system of leap years and came to the conclusion that 11 days should go to get the
calendar in sync with the seasons again. Although the ﬁrst countries switched in the
years following 1582, it took until 1923 before Greece decided to go from 15 February
to 1 March in one night

16.
e Gregorian calendar is one of the most
successful ideas in the history of civilisation.
- Dan Falk
Author of In Search of Time

17.
KingsMaximilian I
Kings meanwhile had another problem, how to set the legitimacy rule in historical
context? For that reason they were already early on experimenting with family trees
and timelines. And although we’ve long since abandoned the idea of counting in the
year of our Kings their work can be seen as an early frontrunner of the Gantt chart

18.
KingsMaximilian I
The red area shows the cut-out from the previous slide. It’s an enormous woodcut
ordered by Maximilian I, and a print of it can be found at the British Museum

19.
Maximilian used vivid printed images like
this to establish the genealogy and
legitimacy of his house and the authority of
his rule, both of which were actually newer
and shakier than he would like to admit.
- Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton
in Cartographies of Time

20.
John
Harrison
In 1714, the British government oﬀered a longitude prize for a method of determining
longitude at sea, with the awards ranging from £10,000 to £20,000 (several million
pounds in modern terms) depending on accuracy.

21.
H5
And John Harrison with the H4 (followed by the H5) was the ﬁrst one to make a
workable version. From that moment, time wouldn’t be the same again.

22.
After 4000 years...
We wound up with a neat system of
seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks,
months and years to break the infinity of
time into manageable chunks.

24.
e clock dissociated time from human
events and helped create belief in an
independent world of mathematically
measurable sequences; the special world of
science. By the close of the seventeenth
century, time was seen as an abstract entity
that marched forward without regards for
human activity.
- Lewis Mumford
in In Search of Time

25.
To tame time we’ve built a scaﬀolding so
big and so deeply ingrained that it has
changed our experience of the world
profoundly

27.
A short history
1. If this, then that
2. Language
3. Story telling
We can think about the evolution of time-thinking in three steps, ﬁrst we got a gut
feeling for an if this, than that chain. We developed a language and a further
development of language helped us to tell stories

28.
You might recognise this
Observe
Scenarios
Act
Reﬂect
We can think about the evolution of time-thinking in three steps, ﬁrst we got a gut
feeling for an if this, than that chain. We developed a language and a further
development of language helped us to tell stories

30.
Mental time travel comprises the mental
reconstruction of personal events from the
past and the mental construction of possible
events in the future.
- omas Suddendorf and Michael
Corballis
in Mental time travel and the evolution of the human
mind, Genetic, Social, and General Psychology
Monographs, 1997

34.
e greater the temporal distance, the more
likely are events to be represented in terms
of a few abstract features that convey the
perceived essence of the events
- Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman
in Temporal Construal, Psychological Review 2003

35.
Many of us overestimate the
uncertainty
Present
Time
Degree of
uncertainty
Future

37.
Time perspective is the often nonconscious
personal attitude that each of us holds
toward time.
- Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
in Paradox of Time

38.
Past
Positive
Their system is a system of ﬁve independent axes, meaning that scoring high or low
on one axe doesn’t necessarily correlate with any of the other axes. The ﬁrst ax of
past positive where the focus is on the "good old days", past successes, nostalgia, etc.

41.
Present
Fatalist
Present
Hedonist
Past
Negative
Past
Positive
Present fatalists are people also stuck in the now but for diﬀerent reasons, for them
there’s no point of making any planning, since they feel no control over their live

42.
Futures
Present
Fatalist
Present
Hedonist
Past
Negative
Past
Positive
And futures: the most recent category shaped by education, upbringing and society.
We have to learn to work with the future and for the future.

43.
Presents may be the invisible men and
women of the twenty-first century, whereas
futures live and play by the rules of time.
- Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd
in Paradox of Time

44.
FuturesPresent
Hedonist
Past
Positive
They say that the healthiest way to live life is high in past positive, cherish the good
times and feel grateful to those things that have happen’t to you. Medium in present
positive, enjoy the now, but not more than you can aﬀord and medium in future
positive

45.
A broader time horizon creates
a more stable now
Observe
Scenarios
Act
Reﬂect
Once you’ve created a positive feedback loop between scenarios, actions and
reﬂections, you can create a more stable now

46.
Discover your own Zimbardo
Time Perspective Inventory at
bit.ly/time-test

47.
We have an amazing ability to use our
minds to travel time, yet due to personal
and social diﬀerences everyone uses
these skills diﬀerently

53.
Degree of
uncertainty
2. What is the degree of uncertainty?
Low
High

54.
e time/uncertainty quadrant
Low uncertainty
High uncertainty
Nearby time Far away time
And we can plot these two questions on a time/uncertainty quadrant, so we can
explore four areas from nearby and low uncertainty to far away and high uncertainty

55.
Patterns
We can than start to ﬁll this quadrant with the design patterns at hand

56.
Reflections and scenarios
Patterns that we can use to help people craft scenarios and reﬂect

75.
Orbit
We don’t have a clear metaphor for anything longer than a year. I tried to explore this
through Orbit, an app that allows you to shoot events in to orbit and have them revisit
you every so many years

76.
An amazing ability to think in time
A rich and deep history of design
patterns
Plenty of opportunities
So, concluding we got